NASA in May 2026 awarded Development Seed a performance-based, indefinite-delivery / indefinite-quantity contract with a maximum potential value of $76 million for scientific research and development support services tied to Open Data Science Initiative (ODSI) projects. The two-year base ordering period begins May 15, 2026, with three one-year options extending service through June 2031. The contracting activity is NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
What ODSI is and why it exists
NASA's Open Data Science Initiative represents a fundamental rethinking of how the agency makes its scientific data holdings accessible to researchers, commercial users, and the general public. Traditional NASA data access was built around FTP archives and proprietary portal systems — researchers downloaded large files, ran local processing pipelines, and returned results. For petabyte-scale Earth observation datasets from missions like Landsat, MODIS, Sentinel (via partnership), and the upcoming PACE, NISAR, and SBG missions, that model has broken down. The datasets are too large to download, too complex to process without specialized infrastructure, and too valuable to lock behind slow download queues.
ODSI replaces that model with cloud-native access patterns: compute moves to the data rather than data moving to the compute. Researchers write analysis code that runs inside the same cloud environment where the data lives, accessing petabyte-scale archives through standardized APIs (STAC, OGC, Zarr, COG) without needing to download anything. The architecture is conceptually similar to what Amazon Web Services did for commercial data warehousing with S3 and Redshift, but adapted for scientific data with strict provenance, version control, and reproducibility requirements.
Development Seed's role
Development Seed is a Washington DC-based technology company founded in 2009, best known in the geospatial and Earth science community as the creators of tools that became foundational open-source infrastructure: TiTiler (cloud-native raster tile server), STAC (SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog, now an OGC standard), and rio-cogeo (Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF tooling). The company's work is deeply embedded in NASA's Earth science data ecosystem — many of NASA's current ODSI tools, APIs, and cloud archive formats were designed in collaboration with Development Seed under previous task orders.
The $76M IDIQ consolidates that relationship into a formal performance-based framework where NASA can issue task orders for specific ODSI capabilities without conducting new full-and-open competitions. Performance-based structure ties payments to measurable outcomes: data ingestion rates, API availability metrics, time-to-access for archived collections, and successful deployment of new AI/ML analysis pipelines.
AI and ML: the growing scope
Beyond data engineering and platform operations, the contract explicitly includes development and deployment of artificial intelligence and machine-learning solutions for NASA's Earth science mission. This is the high-growth element of the scope:
- Automated satellite imagery classification: ML models that process incoming imagery from Earth-observing satellites and automatically generate land cover, sea ice extent, cloud fraction, and other derived products without manual analyst intervention
- Change detection: Time-series analysis pipelines that identify deforestation, urban expansion, flood inundation, and other phenomena across multi-year satellite archives
- Foundation models for Earth observation: Development Seed has been a contributor to the NASA-IBM Prithvi geospatial foundation model, one of the first large-scale pre-trained models for satellite imagery analysis
- Bias detection and model evaluation: Scientific AI models must be auditable; ODSI infrastructure supports the validation pipelines that assess model performance across geographic regions and seasonal conditions
Why performance-based structure matters here
Performance-based contracting (PBC) for software and data services is still relatively uncommon in NASA's contracting portfolio, which has historically relied on cost-plus structures for R&D work. The ODSI IDIQ's PBC structure signals NASA Goddard's confidence that Development Seed's deliverables are measurable and that outcome-based metrics are achievable — a prerequisite for PBC that not all software development work can satisfy. For other small technology firms pursuing NASA data science work, this contract is a reference case for how to structure PBC proposals when NASA is the customer.
The broader NASA open data ecosystem
ODSI is one piece of a larger NASA cloud-data transformation that includes the Earthdata Cloud migration (moving petabytes of legacy DAAC archives to AWS), the Analysis Ready Data initiative (reformatting legacy archives into cloud-native formats), and partnerships with commercial analytics platforms like Microsoft Planetary Computer and Google Earth Engine. Development Seed's ODSI contract positions the company at the center of this transformation — building the tools and infrastructure that make the other investments accessible to the research community.
For commercial Earth observation companies (Planet Labs, Maxar, HawkEye 360, Satellogic) seeking to integrate commercial data with NASA archives for government customers, ODSI infrastructure is increasingly the technical on-ramp — a development that creates subcontracting and partnership opportunities for firms with commercial satellite data assets.